To celebrate the 200th anniversary of the first recorded cricket played in Australia, the Herald has polled Test players, commentators and experts in order to compile a list of the best moments in Australian cricket. Today, the original Australian side that toured England in 1868.

17 Aboriginal pioneers England, 1868

The first team sent from Australia to tour England was not a selection of colonials returning to the mother country but a squad comprised of the first inhabitants of the wide brown land. This may sound fitting enough at first glance but it remains open to debate.

While historians say the players were happy enough on tour, there was a feeling at the time that the Aboriginal team taken to England in 1868 - nine years before the first official Test match - was heavily exploited. Though the tour reaped handsome profits, and launched the concept of international series, it is believed the players received nothing but board and lodging. One of them, known as King Cole, died from pneumonia early in the tour, which lasted a full six months.

Crowds of several thousand turned up for most of their substantial 49 matches but, like many of the distractions on offer in Victorian England, the players' physical appearance was as much a drawcard as their cricket.

The idea had its genesis on the farming stations in the western districts of what was then the colony of Victoria, where Aboriginal labourers gradually joined their white workmates in games of cricket, impressing with their quickly learned skills.

The key figure in the formation of the side that toured England was Thomas Wentworth Wills, best known as a prime mover in the birth of Australian rules football. In November, 1866, Wills formed an indigenous cricket team from the western districts, of which he was captain and coach. The side, playing under nicknames given them by whites, played a match at the MCG on Boxing Day, a game which attracted 8000 spectators.

After an aborted trip to Sydney on which, it is believed, four of the team members died and alcohol abuse was rife, another white colonial took over as captain-coach. With Sydney-based English professional cricketer Charles Lawrence in charge, plans for the trip to England developed apace.

Lawrence, however, met with stern opposition from Victoria's Aboriginal Protection Board, which feared the players would be carelessly exploited. This he overcame by loading them onto a boat at Geelong, ostensibly for a fishing trip. In fact, they were taken onto a steamship which spirited them away from the Victorian authorities to Sydney, where they began their three-month trip to England. Eventually, they played their first match at The Oval, with 7000 people watching.

Matches took place in conjunction with exhibitions of traditional Aboriginal skills, such as boomerang throwing, which were said to have delighted the locals. Their cricketing opponents ranged from what would become county sides to village teams, with the Aborigines mostly losing to the former and beating the latter. They also played at Lord's, against the MCC.

The standard of the players varied slightly, with five or six said to have made most of the running and their teammates contributing little. One batsman, dubbed Mullagh, had a lunchtime batting session against English fast bowler George Tarrant, who said he was as fine a batsman as he had seen. Johnny Cuzens became so adept at fast bowling he was selected for Victoria upon his return home. Another who had originally come from Bathurst, dubbed Twopenny, eventually played for NSW against Victoria.

Despite the strong impressions made on the playing fields of England, the team unfortunately left no legacy for Aboriginal cricket. The prevailing feeling amongst colonial authorities was that they had been treated unfairly, and on arrival back in Australia the team eventually dispersed. Any plans of organising another such tour would be futile. While the team had been away, legislation was passed giving the Governor of Victoria far more control over what business arrangements could be made between European settlers and Aborigines. Trevor Marshallsea

16 Australia's World Cup victory, India, 1987

Australia's victory in the 1987 World Cup in India was a tale of the unexpected. Weakened by a rash of retirements and compromised by rebel tours, Australia's fortunes were at a low ebb. Even the Ashes had been lost and Allan Border, a long-suffering captain, had threatened to throw in the towel. After five years of defeats, Border's team was not expected to prosper in a World Cup played on dusty pitches in the subcontinent. Hardly any broadcasters or reporters were sent to cover the event. No one wanted to hear about another defeat.

Instead, the Australians rose to the occasion. Border and coach Bob Simpson had set about rebuilding the team by replacing fancy players with men committed to the cause. Australia had attended to the basics and throughout the tournament ran well between wickets, fielded impressively and built partnerships.

Border himself led the way with some solid performances. Geoff Marsh, his trusted lieutenant, provided the backbone and scored a telling hundred in a narrow victory over India. David Boon, another recent discovery, made numerous redoubtable contributions and Craig McDermott led the attack with distinction. Most of all, Australia had found a young all-rounder with an air of competitive calm that produced the moniker "The Iceman". Steve Waugh challenged the orthodoxy of one-day cricket by refusing to bowl the usual yorkers, instead mixing up his deliveries in the closing overs. Moreover he had an acute sense of timing as a batsman and a happy knack of finishing on the winning side.

Regarded as the underdogs in the semi-finals, Australia beat a powerful but nervous Pakistan to reach the finals, scheduled for the cauldron of Eden Gardens in Kolkata. England promptly upset both the form book and the locals to join Australia in the final.

Throughout, the match was nip and tuck. Indeed, England looked like winners until Mike Gatting attempted to reverse sweep his counterpart's first ball. Waugh returned, took his opponents by the short and curlies and squeezed his opponents till screams of despair could be heard. Amid scenes of the highest excitement, Australia secured victory by a handful of runs.

Australia had won the World Cup for the first time. Afterwards the players paraded around a vibrant ground with their captain upon their shoulders. They had been worthy winners of the best staged World Cup of them all. Australian cricket did not look back. Now Border, Simpson and company knew they were working on the right lines. Peter Roebuck

15 The bookie scandal, 1998

The spread of illegal bookmaking and match-fixing had been a contagion in cricket for more than a decade but it did not loom large in Australian minds, which had assumed it was a feature of the game indigenous to the Indian subcontinent, until six years ago.

Australia were, initially, on the side of the angels. When Shane Warne, Tim May and Mark Waugh divulged that they had been approached by Pakistan captain Salim Malik with bribes to bowl and bat badly while on tour in September, 1994, they were saluted everywhere - except, of course, Pakistan, whose Ebrahim Inquiry whitewashed the affair.

What was not revealed was that shortly before that tour, during a one-day tournament in Sri Lanka, Warne and Waugh had accepted cash from a bookmaker known only as John for what was euphemistically described as "pitch and weather information", but which in hindsight was probably a preliminary negotiation to draw them into larger deceptions.

Cricket remained in heavy denial about its corruption at this stage, and the story of "John the bookie" and the fines levied on Warne and Waugh by the Australian Cricket Board in February, 1995, remained a closely guarded secret until journalist Malcolm Conn exposed them in December, 1998. The players had to take another more public rap, and were compelled to testify before a special Melbourne session of Pakistan's Qayyum Inquiry into match-fixing.

Soon denial was no longer an option. Crooked players were fingered in almost every Test nation. Two other skippers joined Salim Malik in exile: India's Mohammed Azharuddin and South Africa's Hansie Cronje. Probe after probe was initiated: the Chandrachud Inquiry, Central Bureau of Investigations report in India, the King Commission in South Africa, the O'Regan Report in Australia.

In May, 2001, the International Cricket Council published a report by the head of its new Anti-Corruption Unit, Sir Paul Condon, which lamented that "corrupt practices and deliberate underperformance have permeated all aspects of the game", and described "at least 20 years of corruption linked to betting on international cricket matches". And for a time, glorious uncertainty having become associated with squalid certainty, it seemed that every unexpected event in cricket was subject to a whispering campaign.

Players are now better educated about match-fixing, are quarantined from importunate visitors by security officers, and understand the consequences of detection. Yet the climate today is much the same as 10 years ago: it can't happen here. Or can it? Gideon Haigh

14 Muralitharan called for throwing, MCG, 1995

The story of Muttiah Muralitharan does not reflect well upon cricket, which has never shown itself capable of handling a sensitive issue such as illegal bowling actions. Murali is either a genius or a cheat, depending on your point of view. In reality, there should be no such debate.

For some time before the burly Sydney umpire Darrell Hair no-balled Muralitharan seven times at the MCG on Boxing Day, 1995, players and officials were expressing doubts about the way the Sri Lankan extracted such vicious turn from his off spinners.

But nothing official was done, so that by the time he walked onto the ground that day he had bowled 5892 balls in 23 Tests in six countries, becoming his nation's greatest wicket-taker without being called.

Like many people, Hair thought Murali chucked. He said so in official circles during a tournament in Sharjah earlier that year, describing the action as "diabolical". But he was dissuaded from calling the off spinner by ICC officials, who insisted that a more subtle process - involving an official report followed by examination of videotape - was in place.

But no stern action was taken against Muralitharan, so Hair, standing at the Great Southern Stand end, began calling Murali in his fourth over at 2.45pm. He called him seven times in the next few overs. The Sri Lankans switched their trump card to the other end, where Kiwi Steve Dunne, who had suspicions but would not go so far as Hair, was umpiring.

Theoretically, a bowler being no-balled for throwing ought to be a simple matter, no different to overstepping the front crease. The ball merely has to be rebowled. But chucking has always had a taint associated with it and remains one of cricket's thorniest issues.

Murali and the Sri Lankans argued that he had bowled in this manner for years without official questioning. They believed it was a conspiracy theory. With some justification, they questioned why he needed to be humiliated before a big crowd on a huge stage.

Hair was reviled all over the subcontinent, although other umpires - notably Ross Emerson, who called Murali in a one-dayer later in the same season - supported him. Hair disappeared from big-time umpiring for a time, then returned.

Murali never changed his action, and went on to cut a swathe through opponents for the follow ing decade, and cricket seemed no closer to a solution. Martin Blake